Tuesday, 27 January 2009

How can there even be climate change skeptics?

There's been a mild kerfuffle in the climate change interested blogosphere due to retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist Dr. John S. Theon's statements on serial Climate Fraudster James Hansen and NASA's climate models.

NASA warming scientist James Hansen, one of former Vice-President Al Gore’s closest allies in the promotion of man-made global warming fears, is being publicly rebuked by his former supervisor at NASA.

Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of James Hansen, NASA’s vocal man-made global warming fear soothsayer, has now publicly declared himself a skeptic and declared that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming climate claims and said Hansen was “was never muzzled.” Theon joins the rapidly growing ranks of international scientists abandoning the promotion of man-made global warming fears.

“I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man made,” Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. “I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results,”

“Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress,”

Theon declared “climate models are useless.” “My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit,” Theon explained. “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy,” he added.

Now, if you are one of those promoting the whole climate change scam then the onus is on you to definitively prove your position.

"Assertions without proof can be dismissed without proof" - Christopher Hitchens.

With each passing day the climate change scam is being revealed for all to see and, critically, the so called evidence is crumbling faster than the Larsen Ice Shelf isn't.

For climate change to be something worth spending trillions of dollars of the world's formerly strong economy on three conditions must be proven (not theorised):

1) temperatures are rising;2) the rise is caused primarily by man made CO2 emissions; and3) the consequences for the planet will be catastrophic.

Nearly everyone accepts 1) but 2) and 3) are far from proven. Luckily for Climate Astrologers at NASA and elsewhere else that the Democrats have porked up the non-stimulus bill with hundreds of millions of dollars for climate models so they can be back-fitted and tweaked into proving exactly what politicians, envirofascists and financial industry players who'll make millions from trading carbon credits want to see.

But that's not the point of this post.

The point is this.

How can John Theon, a well regarded atmospheric scientist, not believe in global warming?

How is it that highly, highly qualified scientists (with higher academic qualifications than most of the Hokey Stick team, for example) do not believe in catastrophic global warming?

How is it that Roy Spencer is a skeptic?

Or Bob Carter?

Or Tim Ball?

Or John Christy?

If 'the science is settled' and the proof is so definitive then how does it come about that people such as Christy who have been involved in the collection of climate data via satellites do not believe that there's a problems?

If a spokesman for the Climate Industry would like to let me know how that's possible then I'd be most appreciative.

30 comments:

Anonymous
said...

So you want it to be proven that the impacts of anthropogenic climate change will be catastrophic? Now just how self-lobotomised are you? Perhaps you can see how idiotic the demand is by considering whether or not you could prove that the impacts won't be catastropic?

"If 'the science is settled' and the proof is so definitive then how does it come about that people such as Christy who have been involved in the collection of climate data via satellites do not believe that there's a problems?"

No matter how obvious the reality, there will always be people prepared to question it - and there will always idiots prepared to believe them. There are flat-earthers, there are AIDS denialists, there are creationists, there are scientologists, there are those who believe asbestos is harmless, and there are many, many more. Scientists with a lot of vanity and not a lot of integrity can much more easily get the attention they seek by questioning the obvious than they can by endorsing it. You provide ample demonstration of how easily they find weak-minded but loud-mouthed followers.

Once it is safe to speak out, they finally do. I hope we hear more from these people before cap&Trade and the evil Carbon Rationing are jammed down our throats. Later will be vegetarianism and then the 'final solution' Population Control is next. All I can say is speak up, email your representatives in whatever country you reside. Do it now.

What an awesome missing of the point by Mr Fuckwit! Do you know the word 'analogy'? If not, go and look it up in the dictionary. Incidentally, one of those 'scientists' you worship is in fact a creationist. Do you know which one?

Can you prove that the impacts of climate change won't be catastrophic? If you can, then do so. If you can't, explain why not.

Of course I know that John Christy has strong religious beliefs however if you understand religious people properly then you know that their religion does not disable them from being rational.

And I say that as a person who doesn't have a religious bone in his body.

I can prove that higher temperatures are not catastrophic by simply looking to history and seeing that it's never been catastrophic, which is more than the left can do with its completely made up doomsday scenarios.

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

You've got a long-retired ex-scientist who's published nothing in the field in years who comes out announcing that all the current people in this field are doing stuff that's just wrongheaded and won't work. That's not news. Not in any field. Happens all the time, and means very little. Really, you should read a bit more history of science.

Planck said what he did because there were physics professors who just would not accept quantum mechanics. It did not make sense to them, they would not go there.

Well-known retired geology professors were denying continental drift into the late 1970s.

Dude, you're searching a mountain of evidence to find the few crumbs that go your way. If you want to you can do that, but don't fool yourself that you're approaching the evidence from a neutral point of view or evaluating both sides fairly. You're starting with a conclusion and looking for evidence, instead of the other way around.

Creationism is not rational. Declaring yourself a creationist means declaring yourself unscientific. Roy Spencer is a creationist, and therefore not a scientist.

So... 35,000 deaths in the European heatwave of 2003 was not a catastrophe? The displacements of hundreds of thousands and the loss of vast areas of farmland in the Dust Bowl was not a catastrophe? The century-long drought that caused the collapse of the Maya was not a catastrophe? The 4.2 kiloyear event that cause the collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt was not a catastrophe?

I think that 'catastrophe' is another word you need to check the definition of.

As expected, you just spout vacuous inanities when your opinions are exposed as nonsense. Clearly, your bizarre notion that rapid climate change never harmed anyone is completely ridiculous. Try again to give a meaningful response to that point.

You bang on about models fairly often, without ever giving any clue that you understand how they work or what they predict. You've never yet specified how you're judging them - instead, you seem to think that just saying "They don't work!" is enough. Here is a model that works (black is observations, red is model). Are you mighty impressed, or are you going to find, somewhere in the not very great depths of your intellect, some reason to persist in your primitive beliefs?

Don't you just love a graph that reliably starts during the recovery from the bottom of the Little Ice Age 50 years earlier? Let's see this graph with the Medieval Warming Period included and then we can divine its true significance.

And yet, how accurate can even this model be that so dramatically distorts the temperature highs in the 30's? As we know, at least half the top 10 highest years were before WW II.

Jack, it's posts such as this that bring me to your blog most every day. And this loopy lib clown that is obsessed by your systematic dismantling of the canon of the church of the global warmingists is a wonderful piece of entertainment. He so truly captures the blind zeal of the acolytes of that church.

Is it possible that he is a construct of yours as a satire? He's so over the top that one.....hmmmm......wonders.

Krumhorn - from your comments about temperatures in the 1930s it looks like you've fallen into the trap of confusing 'The United States' with 'The World'. Check a globe and see if you can spot the difference.

Lacton, you dopey cunt. You obviously don't know the details of where that graph came from. You're just posting vacuous nonsense in the hope that no-one will notice that you've been embarrassed. I'm sure 'Krumhorn' and 'hoppers' will lap it up, but to anyone who hasn't had a lobotomy, you just look really stupid.

Whether the graph shows a forecast or a hindcast or a mixture of the two is obviously secondary to the fact that quite obviously it reproduces the observations. You claimed that no model had ever worked. Your definition of 'worked' must be as retarded as you are.

To claim that a backfitted model 'works' because it hindcasts correctly is taking intellectual objectivity to a new low.

If I created a financial market model today and backfitted the recent drop in world markets so that it exactly matched everything that happened since 1900 then would you trust it to forecast correctly?

Financial markets aren't governed by physics, they are governed by human behaviour. Your analogy is meaningless. If you can't even tell the difference between physics and psychology then it's no wonder you are completely unable to understand climate science, even at a very basic level.

A better analogy is this: if I created a computer model of the solar system to predict solar eclipses, and I found that it accurately predicted the times of solar eclipses as far back as we had records, would you trust its prediction of when the next would occur?

No, predicting eclipses is nothing like adding two and two, and financial markets do not remotely behave like the climate system.

The simple point remains that the model worked. You claimed that no model had ever worked. As your claim has been proven utterly, utterly false, now you're just bullshitting around. Sorry, fellow, but I'm running rings around you here, and you look more and more stupid with every post. Just admit the model worked, and move on.

As expected, you just post a load of vacuous nonsense in response to being proven wrong. The paper showed that global temperatures since 1990 followed the model predictions. What's your problem with admitting that? Just saying "but so-and-so said that Rahmstorf was wrong!" is playground stuff. But then I suppose your intellect stopped developing at around the time you were at primary school, so what more could we possibly expect?

There we go, change the subject again, bring in something completely unrelated. How pathetically immature you are. Global temperatures since 1990 have followed the model predictions. That is fact and it's all laid out very clearly in Rahmstorf et al. You have no counterarguments. Not a single one. None. Talk any more and you'll only make yourself look even more stupid.

I don't want to be a part of the bitter polemics in this controversy but I have an observation on the early work at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, an organization that I regard as an unscientific NASA boondoggle. I worked there as a contractor off and on from 1974 through 1977.

The climatology group there simplified a global circulation model that could not predict weather with any accuracy for sixty hours. They simplified the model and reduced its resolution so as to fit it onto a computer with one tenth the memory. Then they used the smaller model to predict climate change for a period of twenty five years. This was not science, it was comparable to astrology.

I have not followed later developments in climatological computer modeling but, unless it has made giant strides since 1977, I am ready to dismiss it as worthless.